


ceci n'est pas un bandeau

by Cryptid495



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, kara goes a bit nonverbal, lena has all the top energy in the universe except when she's sad, lil bit of underwear kink
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:14:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29278287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cryptid495/pseuds/Cryptid495
Summary: Lena has been wearing increasingly stunning and risky corporate/fashion dresses to mess with Kara's mind. It finally pays off.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 34
Kudos: 460





	1. Chapter 1

She had to know what she was doing, right?

Lena was bent forward over the bathroom counter, paying unnecessary attention to her own frankly already-perfect eyelashes. The deep, deep V cut down the back of her undoubtedly very expensive dress had drawn Kara’s eyes downward, over all that smooth corded uninterrupted skin, at least five seconds ago.

She had been staring for far too long. Ridiculous.

Her hands started moving again, retying her hairband for the fifth time as she forced her body to remember how to breathe. Yes, Lena was gorgeous. Terrifying, somehow. Witty, and kind, and so funny, and god, her ass.

Kara’s hairband snapped in her hands and she yelped, dragging her eyes back up to Lena’s face as quick as she could.

There was just a faint smirk on the Luthor’s face. Was that the expression she usually wore, when Kara did something clumsy, or had she caught Kara staring? For all her ability to ask Lena the right questions on paper, Kara never had been able to read all of Lena’s subtleties.

She stood, and turned, and the deep-cut V round the front of her dress was absolutely no better for Kara’s sanity. She reached out for Kara’s hand, and took the broken hairband. “Oh, Kara. Let me find you a spare.”

Damnit. It was a running joke for them, that Kara never had a spare. Maybe it was the little bit of teasing that came with every broken hairband that had left Kara somehow on some level unwilling or incapable of ever remembering to hide a stockpile somewhere - back pocket, purse, anywhere at all.

Oh no. Lena didn’t have her Dior tote, the bag of tricks that had saved hers and Kara’s bacon on so many other occasions. This was a black tie event, and she was stuck with a tiny but quite bold black-and-white Chanel clutch.

A clutch that, judging by the small pile of cosmetics next to the sink behind Lena, most certainly did not contain any hairbands.

“Lena to Kara, Lena to Kara. Come in.” 

Kara tore her gaze away from the spot where the V of Lena’s dress swooped just low enough to reach her lower sternum, and looked up directly into an outright sinful smirk.

“This dress has really messed you up, huh?” She murmured, and Kara was pinned in place. “I wonder how close you are, to… acting. Would this be enough?” She leaned in, her voice and breath searing Kara’s ear, setting her cheeks to burning.

Kara felt her jaw clench, completely outside of her control. She could barely even register what was happening through her heart hammering in her ribcage, her blood thundering in her ears, and the deep yawning need in her abdomen.

“Hmm. Almost,” Lena straightened up, and looked Kara right in the eyes, and licked her bottom lip. “Well, we still have to get you that spare hairband.”

Kara didn’t know where she found the strength, but she maintained eye contact. Even as Lena very, very slowly pulled aside her dress from the slit at her left thigh, and curled her fingers underneath it, and slid downward with laced black fabric looped around her thumbs, sliding inch by inch down her pale, slender legs.

Kara’s suit was far too hot, she realised, as Lena slid her panties over her heels. The collar was far too tight, she thought as Lena stood back up, dress spilling back into place, never quite having revealed anything more than thighs to Kara. It just didn’t breathe right, she frantically tried to distract herself as Lena leaned in close and took Kara’s hair and tied it into a perfect ponytail with her honest-to-god lacy black underwear.

She could feel her face burning.

She didn’t dare breathe, Lena was so close.

And some seconds passed, and Lena looked back up from Kara’s lips and settled back onto her heels and raised an eyebrow.

“Oh no, I’ve been too much…”

“What? No!” Finally, words exploded out of Kara’s mouth, much too loud but absolutely as she meant them.

Lena tilted her head, visibly scanned Kara’s face and body language with every ounce of her attention. She raised a hand to rest on Kara’s cheek, put the other on her shoulder, and it was grounding.

“Kara, you don’t have to lie to save my pride. It’s alright if that was too much. I got impulsive, I took a risk, I did something I thought you would enjoy, I didn’t ask you first when I should have done. Three of the service staff have ponytails. I’m going to go out and find one of them and ask if they have any spare hairbands in exchange for a tip, okay? I guarantee one of them will. I should be no more than five minutes. Alright?”

She turned to go, and Kara grabbed her hand. She knew her cheeks were burning, she knew that if she tried to speak she’d choke on her own tongue, so she settled for shaking her head.

“I… I don’t understand,” Lena said, eyes cast just a little way down and to the side.

Kara threw everything to the wind. All in one motion she stepped right into Lena’s personal space, one palm sliding down to her ass, now perfectly smooth with nothing under the dress, the other coming up, sliding into Lena’s own ponytail, and pulling her in for a kiss loaded with everything running through her system right then and there.

Lena jolted, let out something between a hum and a yelp directly into Kara’s lips, brought her hands tentatively up to Kara’s cheeks and then very deliberately kissed her back.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” Kara said, thumb stroking Lena’s hair as she held her close. “I think you’re the only person who can make me really completely speechless sometimes.”

“Oh, thank God.” Lena visibly blinked away what must have been the beginnings of tears and leaned in to kiss Kara again, open-mouthed and breathy.

They lost track of time, in among their kisses. Lena’s lips were so soft and perfect that Kara couldn’t help but pluck at them with her own every now and again; Lena returned the favour, the tips of their tongues brushed against each other and against lips and slowly slid deeper into each other’s mouths, Lena making sport of pushing through Kara’s lips and as far down her tongue as she can, Kara making sport of trapping Lena’s tongue and counterattacking.

It wasn’t until Lena squeaked with the cold that Kara realised she’d rucked Lena’s skirt all the way up, and had both hands on Lena’s bare ass. She stared for a moment in the mirror, drinking in the sight of Lena’s backside, all skin and no lace, and then she mournfully let it drop.

They both caught their breath.

“They’ll be expecting me to stick around for another half-hour,” Lena sighed, back in front of the mirror again, stripping back smudged lipstick and reapplying what she needed. “But after that…”

“I think… I think I really want to take you back to mine,” Kara said. “I think I really want that memory whenever I wake up. And whenever you stay around after movie night. And just… just all the time.”

Lena finished reapplying the last of her lipstick, stood, scrubbed at Kara’s lips with her makeup remover for a moment, then nodded. “That sounds perfect,” she said. “Also, I’ll need you to eat me out on your kitchen counter. I have literally been fantasising about that for months.”

Kara stammered.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Lena outright grinned. “See you out in the crowd. And don’t forget, out by the car in half an hour.”

“...yes, ma’am.”

“Perfect.” Lena smoothed her dress, looked over her shoulder at Kara, winked, and left.

Kara stared at the mirror for at least ninety seconds before finally letting out all the breath she hadn’t realised she was holding in one long “fuuuuuuck.”

She swore several more times. Splashed her face with cold water. Stared at the ceiling.

“You knew all along, didn’t you?” She interrogated her reflection in the bathroom mirror. “All that snuggling up with her and deliberately not thinking about it. All that touching, all that smiling, all that time you just kept making for her, and kept hoping she’d make for you. The flowers. God, you both had it for each other so hard, right from the beginning, huh?”

She double-checked her face. Some of her lipstick was missing but Lena had of course done a perfect job of removing her own darker shade from where it had most definitely been smudged in the course of their making out. She reapplied from the tube she kept in her inside pocket and there, as she stowed it away again, brushing against her fingertip…

...was a hairband.

She threw it straight in the bin. Not a thing in the world could stop her from keeping Lena’s panties in her hair for as long as possible. She took a deep breath, fortified herself against the part of her brain now wheedling at her that she was being a creep, told it very sternly that even if she was, Lena very clearly approved of this specific subtype of creepdom and so she was absolutely going to embrace it and that part of her brain that defaulted to shame could, with all due respect, go fuck itself.

She finally managed to leave the bathroom. Hey, at least she’d left more than enough time for it not to look suspicious.

If she had ever been capable of not looking suspicious, that is. She swiftly retreated to a seat in the corner of the room with one of Lena’s preferred whiskies - definitely not a symptom of her head swimming with hopes and plans for their upcoming marathon.

She savoured the taste. Imagined tasting it on Lena’s tongue as she kissed her up against the front door of her apartment.

Twenty-five minutes passed easily, sitting, nodding with a vacant pleasant little smile to anyone who walked by, contemplating all the steps that would be involved in making Lena scream her name.

She found herself at the car, in Lena’s arms, melting into Lena’s lips. At the front door to her apartment, refusing to remove her hand from Lena’s waist, and having to dig around for her key one-handed.

And Lena laughed at her, and opened the door.

“I’m so sorry,” Kara said.

“Hmm?”

“For being so oblivious. I gave you a key, Lena! Even Alex doesn’t have a key, and I gave you one without even thinking because I wanted you around, I wanted my space to be yours too, I didn’t want anything between us. I’m so sorry, you must have felt like I was leading you on all this time, I swear I didn’t mean to… God, I’m so stupid.”

“Honey, stop.” Lena had a crooked little smile, her hands resting on Kara’s shoulders. “You grew up in rural America. Your mother is an absolute gem but she won’t ever have taught you how to break the assumption that being gay is a rarity. So your sister came out and no matter how open-minded you were for a rural American, you thought ‘surely both of us can’t be gay?’ Does that sound about right?”

“...yeah. And, and, mom wants grandkids? So I…”

“Recombinant IVF, or we could always adopt,” Lena shrugged. “The Luthor apparatus has more than enough money to bribe away the homophobia in the adoption system, or just lobby to reform it completely.”

Kara knew the blood had drained from her face. “...we can adopt?” she murmured.

Lena yelped. “Oh god! I mean, okay, I desperately hoped we were always a sure thing but just listen to me! Acting like we’ve been together all along! Scary overly attached girlfriend much?”

“I mean,” Kara said with a grin. “We haven’t even technically agreed on ‘girlfriend’ yet…”

Lena hid her hands in her face, another “Oh god” escaping her but far more muffled this time.

Kara peeled Lena’s hands carefully away from her face and kissed her. “I was a wreck after the bathroom, so I just sat in the corner until leaving time. And while I was sat there thinking, I went over a lot of things in my head. You know we’ve been on like a hundred dates already, right?”

Lena blinked. “You see it that way too?”

“It took me until now,” Kara said. “But… like with the keys, you know? Ever since our first interview, and all the flowers? I realised that I can’t stand having any obstacles at all between us. I realised that every time I saw something that would even slow either of us down just a little from being with each other whenever we wanted, I dismantled it. And so did you.”

“Yeah.” Lena was smiling now, none of that fear or surprise left in her eyes. “Remember how hard you had to fight to convince me it was okay to bring spare clothes round?”

“Remember that month we binged all those detective shows you loved so much? The sofa broke our backs after what, day three?”

“Hey now, we alternated with your sci-fi. And… literally slept together in your bed for an entire month. Kara, I take it all back, how were you so dense?”

“I’m sorry.” Kara stepped in close, looked down. “There was something else on my mind. Something that I have to tell you, before we go any further. And I desperately hope this isn’t going to stop us, or break us, or anything like that. I just…”

“Kara… you’re scaring me. This has been so many emotions already. What else…”

She took one step back from Lena, and lifted herself into the air.

Silence.

“I wondered,” Lena croaked out. “I never could completely prove it to myself, but I wondered. And I understand, you know. Why you’d keep it secret for so long.”

“I didn’t want to,” Kara said, floating back down to ground. “But… sometimes it feels like I’m the only one in the world who can see past your last name. Everyone else got so aggressive and hard whenever I said I wanted to tell you, and I knew they’d treat you so much worse if they thought you knew. And I know them, and I know you, and I didn’t want any of what happened with Lex and Clark to happen with us. And I’m so sorry, I’ve lied to you all along and I didn’t want to, Lena, I wanted you to know, I didn’t want any secrets between us. But the DEO would have been at your doorstep every day, and Clark would have started interfering with L-Corp whenever he thought something looked suspicious, and Rao, I hate so much that they’re all so scared of Lex they can’t see you for you…”

Lena wrapped her arms around Kara and squeezed her tight. “I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it. It’s a trauma response. There are records of every experiment Lex ran on Clark buried in deep secret files in the old LexCorp archives. I hope that he’s in counselling, because I can only describe what Lex did as torture. Prolonged, psychological and physical. He was a monster, Kara, and the long-term cost of that is Clark’s fear, and the distrust of every agency that ever helped Clark in his side of that fight.”

“And yes, it hurts that you didn’t tell me. Even in secret. But... I have to understand. I spent my entire life up until Lex’s imprisonment building spectacular webs of lies, just to keep my real goals and sentiments and friends as far away from Lillian as possible.”

“...can you forgive me?”

“Have you been honest about everything else, and will you continue to be?”

“Yes.” Kara wasn’t quite sure how that one word communicated everything, but Lena’s nod and her little half-smile proved that it did.

“Alright,” Lena said. “Alright. I am… entirely emotioned out, I don’t think I could stay in my own head long enough for a medium kiss, let alone all that sex we had planned. Can we just go flop on the couch and put on some music?”

“Definitely,” Kara said. “But, um… I’m also definitely keeping this hairband. Apparently I’m a bit of a creep. Every time I remember it’s there, I get prickles.”

“Oh, I’m not changing.” Lena arched an eyebrow. “Definitely keeping my options open. But for now, couch.”

“...and pizza?”

Lena just raised her phone in Kara’s direction. It was already on their usual food delivery app.

“I love you,” Kara said without thinking.

Lena smiled. “Idiot.”


	2. Chapter 2

_ Are you still watching Alien Worlds? _

The TV sat there in low-power mode, barely lighting the couch. Lena had chosen the evening’s show, a supposedly-fictional documentary series, a bit like  _ Walking with Dinosaurs _ but for non-Terran life. It had turned out to be a fantastic choice. Their taste in TV shows didn’t overlap by a lot - Kara had often found herself watching Lena far more than watching Lena’s chosen documentary or true-crime series - but in this case the first two and a bit episodes before they both fell asleep had been Lena asking what was real and what wasn’t - and to Kara’s delight they had most definitely had some real aliens on the show staff, because most of the creatures that showed up on screen she had seen in xenobiology textbooks as a child. Sure, there was a lot of artistic license - humans were like that - but most everything had been recogniseable and Lena had genuinely enjoyed hearing the differences, filling in the gaps in her knowledge.

And now here they were. A few hours had passed - the clouds in the sky outside Kara’s balcony had completely changed texture and were now underlit by the city instead of backlit by the sunset.

And Lena was asleep on her, and Kara desperately needed the bathroom.

She tried not to wake her, she really did, but on her third careful wiggle she nudged the remote, hit one of the volume buttons, and brought the TV back into standard power mode.

They both groaned against the glare of the screen.

Lena rubbed her eyes as she sat up, shrugging off the white quilted throw Kara had draped over the back of the couch for these exact accidental naps - another sign, Kara thought, that was a blaring gay klaxon in retrospect.

“Hey,” Lena said, kneeling back and helping Kara back up to sitting and giving her a drowsy smile.

“Hey yourself,” Kara leaned forward, kissed her on the corner of her lips, stood up. “Sorry, really need the bathroom.”

“See you in bed?” Lena said, fingertips tracing the spot Kara had kissed, smiling absently.

Kara couldn’t contain her grin. “Yeah.”

And a few minutes later, there she was, having changed into one of the pairs of emergency pyjamas that Kara kept around - the white ones with the black and teal circuitry, her favourite pair.

“Another one of those signs that I should probably have noticed a couple of years ago.” Kara placed a fingertip on the circuitry pattern.

“You know, this pair was particularly obvious,” Lena teased. “You would never have bought these for yourself. You’re all fluff and golden retrievers and primary colours. I knew you’d bought them deliberately for me the moment I saw them.”

“I love how you do that,” Kara tossed her cobalt green cufflinks onto her bedside table and shucked off her shirt. “Kryptonian senses and I still miss so much, but you absorb everything and you can turn it into data and understanding just like that.”

“Like right now?” Lena’s voice came dry, amused, and Kara finally realised that she was quite literally stripping for her. She stared back at Lena, blinking owlish, suit pants halfway down her legs, but Lena responded only by raking her eyes up and down Kara’s body with one hell of a smirk on her lips.

“Keep going,” Lena murmured, and Kara felt her cheeks burning even as something in the back of her mind freely acknowledged that it was impossible to resist that tone of voice.

She got the suit pants off without being too clumsy about it, and stood up straight. She saw Lena’s eyes dip to her abdomen again, saw the tip of Lena’s tongue slide across her lower lip.

Rao, was this it?

She made a little bit of a show of the next part, raised her hands to her head, tensed her arms just a little as she ran her fingers back to her hairtie, then  _ squeaked _ as she found lace.

Lena snorted. “You forgot?”

Kara stammered as she disentangled Lena’s lacy black underwear from her hair. “...yeah.”

Lena’s grin was very stupid right now, Kara decided. But then she kneeled up in the bed, shuffled over, and took the garment out of her hands. “Who would have thought it? Kara Danvers has a commando kink.”

“Oh Rao, I do, don’t I?”

Lena just smirked, pressed the bunched panties against Kara’s lips for a second, then tossed them over her shoulder and leaned in and kissed her.

She short-circuited. That was absolutely the only way to describe it. Silk and lace and Lena’s lips against her own all in the space of a few seconds, all profoundly exacerbated by her senses? Kara whimpered into the kiss, heard and felt Lena chuckle into her lips. By reflex her lips opened to make room for Lena’s breath, and then Lena’s did as well, and she reeled from the sheer intimacy of sharing air but she kept kissing until Lena knelt back, looked at her with an eyebrow raised. “The Kryptonian sensorium doesn’t mind old whiskey breath?”

“It’s…” Kara searched for the expressions she needed. “Intense. The scents are strong but they don’t often come with that repulsion instinct that humans seem to get with lots of things. Does that make sense?”

Lena nodded, and settled back into bed, and lifted the cover for Kara. “Nu-uh,” she said as Kara reached for the pyjama drawer. “As you are.”

And so it was that they lay together in Kara’s bed, for what must have been the hundredth time but what was also undoubtedly the first. Lena pushed and pulled Kara into exactly the right position, on her back fairly close to the middle of the bed, and she tucked herself into Kara’s side and lay her head on her shoulder.

“Is this alright?”

“If you’re comfortable,” Kara said, and felt Lena nod. “Then it’s perfect.” She turned her head and craned down a little, and Lena looked up and gave her one last drowsy kiss.

“Absolutely perfect.”

Lena’s hand came to rest on Kara’s stomach as her body shut back down.

The Kryptonian sensorium gave her everything. Lena was perhaps one of the few people who wouldn’t be horrified to know that Kara knew all the sounds of her body, from the obvious to the deep and subtle. The quiet thundering of blood through her veins and arteries, the moving of liquids in her digestive system, the slow rush of her diaphragm and the occasional rasping catch of her voicebox on her breath.

She listened for a while, until Lena’s internal world lulled her back to sleep.

  
  
  


Kara’s subconscious had been thrashing afterburner all night, assaulting her with possibilities, and for the first few moments awake she wasn’t entirely sure where the boundary of sleep gave way to the waking world - until the figure straddling her leaned down and kissed her neck.

Her hands clenched around air and bedsheets. Her back arched, and Lena rose into the air a little way. She laughed soft into Kara’s neck, shifted forward a little.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Though I do wonder if you ever noticed all those times I got a sneaky touch of your abs.”

Lena’s breath and voice in her ear were overwhelming, but Kara was determined to prove herself at least a little bit capable of matching Lena’s intellect. “Hmm… that time we ordered from Squizza a week or so ago. You stood up to go get another slice and did that casual stomach-touch you sometimes do.”

“Oh, well done. I mean, that’s one of about a hundred times, and I have a sneaky feeling that you only remember it because that square pizza place had some really good dips, but I think you’ve still earned a little reward.” Lena breathed a little closer. “Sometimes when we were curled up watching something, I would make sure I was breathing into your neck. Turns out I really like giving you goosebumps.” And then her teeth sank into the flesh behind Kara’s ear.

All the air plumed out of Kara’s lungs at the sensation, skin prickling and heating from beneath, goosebumps running down her deltoids. “Fuck…” she let out.

And then Lena’s face was right in front of hers, lips a hair’s breadth away, and her voice came low. “That is the plan, yes.”

And neither of them had showered in about twenty-four hours, and Kara was still in yesterday’s underwear, and they both still had old makeup patched on them, and the morning sun was a great amber waterfall spilling into the room and glittering through the dust raised by their movement, and it was all, irretrievably, unquestionably, perfect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oops, chapter two! i have absolutely no set-in-stone thoughts for this fic, it's almost certainly just going to be marshmallow fluff with occasional episodic superhazards, but one thing i have realised is that for some reason utterly unknown to me i am very much feeling that this is not going to be nearly as explicit a fic as i had originally intended
> 
> so uh
> 
> enjoy?

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this instead of so many other things i should be doing and/or writing
> 
> i hope you like it as much as i was incapacitated by the need to commit it to paper


End file.
